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Reskilling

Theme: Questions of “know-how,” “skill,” and “technique” have resurfaced in artistic discourse. Many practices are revisiting applied arts—ceramics, textiles, glass, etc.—, transgressing boundaries between craft, design, and contemporary art and disrupting normative values associated with such hierarchical categories. This issue will examine significant transformations that have resulted from this exploration of traditional media and the revival of the “well-made” object.

Post-studio practice transformed art at the end of the last century, bringing to near-completion the slow deskilling of studio practice. Through deskilling, studio mastery became synonymous with tedium and lack of intellectual rigour, and despite the avant-garde’s socialist sympathies, deskilling distanced modernism from labour altogether. This paper provides a first-person critique of some of the positions and assumptions contained within ideas of deskilling and reskilling through both the artist’s studio work and academic research.

Technics and Tradition examines transformations concerned with issues of craft, technique, and tradition in the field of contemporary art and the concept of “the well made” as a criterion for works of art. The text considers the work of five recent Montréal exhibitions by artists who are weaving together the apparently contradictory requirements of memory and of innovation, embracing the unforeseeable, and emptiness, as both a goal and the condition of artistic practice.

This article deals with the singular status of moulding, a particular savoir-faire that is gaining prestige in the domains of both artistic practice and art theory. The author questions the anthropological paradigm of the imprint developed by art historian Didi-Huberman by showing that it cannot account for the diversified nature of contemporary artists’ productions. In this context, she examines three practitioners of moulding whose work eludes the melancholic discourse of the imprint: Rachel Whiteread, Valérie Blass, and Chloé Desjardins. Her analysis focuses mainly on the latter’s production.

This text examines the reuse of artisanal techniques related to the porcelain object in the current practices of Shary Boyle, Laurent Crastes, and Brendan Lee Satish Tang. While embracing the technical process demanded of porcelain manufacture, the works of these three artists differ nonetheless from the traditional object. By altering the iconography and material presentation attributed to the decorative object, the artists subvert their adoptive tradition to reveal the critical and heuristic scope of the work.

DOMINIQUE ALLARD

Un-designing: Serge Murphy, Architecture and Felt Time

This article analyzes Serge Murphy’s exhibition The Shape of Days at the Musée des beaux-arts, Montréal (June 22–October 2, 2011). Erasing everyday objects’ use value, Murphy “un-designs” them, allowing them to examine the relationships among decoration, trash, surplus, and modern interior space. Pressed into a dense, linear format, his relief sculptures also become means to explore the relationships between the representation of time as a linear progression and its heterogeneous, rhythmic, felt qualities.

EMILY ROSAMOND

When the Belly Is Full the Brain Starts to Think: Craft and Criticism in the Work of Daniel Halter

Zimbabwean artist Daniel Halter turns to curio crafts to examine the legacies of dispossession and inflation that have occurred in his homeland since Robert Mugabe came to power. Using Walter Benjamin’s discussion of Haussmannization, I argue Halter’s turn towards the production of craft preserves a trace of labour and value in the devalued Zimbabwean economy. In doing so, Halter’s work also considers how Europe and Africa relate through these disposable crafts and highlights the consumptiveness of Western capitalism and the lack of access to land in Zimbabwe.

ANDREW HENNLICH

ARTICLES

My Winnipeg

The exhibition My Winnipeg, presented at La maison rouge, invites us to discover the arts scene of a town haunted by a sombre malaise tinged with bleak melancholy. This journey into the Winnipeg imagination introduces us to an array of artists who value the collective dimension of artistic production. The construction of artistic identity here is deeply rooted in the appropriation of a common territory and spatiality. The relative isolation of Winnipeg, the absence of rivalry among its artists, and their acknowledgement of common local influences converge to create a unique artistic force.